Archive: February, 2012

End of the gravy train for interest only mortgages?

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Interest only mortgages allowed some people to get mortgages that they really shouldn’t have been able to take out. Often, at the height of the credit and property boom of the mid-noughties, these mortgages could be obtained at 100% of the property’s value. Some lenders were guilty of not checking the validity or viability of…

Stamping out first-time-buyer momentum

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New house fund

In just over a month the curtain will come down on the stamp duty holiday which has spared thousands of first time buyers from paying a tax on their new homes. The announcement in the Autumn Statement – a sort of mini Budget outlined in November each year – that the initiative was to be…

Bankers’ pay: an extra-terrestrial view

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Flight of the Navigator blog

Imagine for a few moments that you are an alien, viewing Earth for the first time. Don’t get too hung up on the type of alien you want to be (I personally would be the alien out of the film Flight of the Navigator, but feel free to choose your own extra-terrestrial self). Anyway back…

Buy-to-let is back!

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Buy-to-let suffered a more pronounced low than the mainstream mortgage market in 2009, as the full impact of the financial crisis revealed itself. But now it seems that the sector is making something of a comeback. This week, moneyfacts.co.uk released figures that revealed that the number of buy-to-let mortgages available had precisely doubled from 243…